Final day @ PDC08

Today was the closing day of the Participatory Design Conference. It wasn't a full day, a plenary session of research papers this morning, and a closing keynote after lunch. A few things I'd like to mention from the presentations I saw today...

A presentation I really liked because of the combination of theory on methods and examples from practice was about new ways of engaging with exhibition spaces. I was especially charmed by one of the products designed in this project, which was a movable hydroscope (looking a bit like a car tyre with a computer screen in the middle) which visitors of an aquarium could move over the floor (which represented a virtual ocean), see photo (source: http://www.ijdesign.org). Interesting about the theoretical part of this presen- tation was the discovery that methods that I already know and have used myself, turn out to have beautiful names, such as aesthetic and fictitional inquiry (sounds nice, doesn't it?).

Furthermore, the keynote presentation of today, although a tad too long, included some interesting projects. The speaker was Natalie Jeremijenko of Environmental Health Clinic, which is a really cool initiative of New York University. I quote their website: "The clinic works like this: you make an appointment, just like you would at a traditional health clinic, to talk about your particular environmental health concerns. What differs is that you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals but for actions: local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving your environmental health; plus referrals, not to medical specialists but to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organizations and local government or civil society groups: organizations that can use the data and actions prescribed as legitimate forms of participation to promote social change." Just take a look at the site, though it has some usability issues, the projects are worthwhile.

So, that was that for the conference. In retrospect, I quite liked this conference. It was my first time to attend and I had a good time. I especially liked the parallel exploratory sessions, because they hosted the very concrete, practical examples which provided lots of inspiration for my own work. I also liked most of the more theoretical presentations in the plenary research paper sessions (which actually had pretty few research presentations for that matter), although in my opinion these sessions had a bit too many overview presentations of the current position of participatory design. I would have liked to hear more ideas for the future. Another thing that I liked was the community of PDC visitors, of which most people were regulars and knew each other well. It was a small group of people, but very nice and open minded. Finally, the organization of the conference was really very good (and I don't say that often!). There was lots of time reserved for questions and discussion in each session, and not a single one of the sessions that I visited ran late. Quite an accomplishment. In summary, the conference was very much worthwhile and I will definitely submit a paper for the next edition in 2010 (especially since this edition will be held in Australia!).

One last thing to mention was that we went on a hike in Brown County State Park with a small group of conference visitors (most left immediately after the conference), which I enjoyed a lot. It was nice to see a bit of the surroundings of Bloomington, it is quite beautiful out here (unfortunately, we were a few weeks too early for the typical autumn colours).

So, I'm all packed and ready to leave for Chicago tomorrow morning! I could not reserve a shared taxi to the airport, so I will have to get up early tomorrow morning to catch the Shuttle bus to Indianapolis.